Sweden’s labour force grew by 122,000 people in the year to August 2026, while employment rose by 103,000, according to Statistics Sweden (SCB). Unemployment increased by 19,000 as a result. These employment in Sweden statistics cover job totals, jobless rates by group and county, EU rankings, salaries, vacancies and the September 2026 forecast from Konjunkturinstitutet (KI). Employment in Sweden Statistics 5,423,000 people employed in August 2026, up 103,000 on a year earlier 70.9% e...

We sometimes need to convert binary data to text. For example, your emails must be stored as text files. Naïvely, you could just use a string of 0 and 1 , but it would mean using one character per bit. We can do better by using 64 ASCII characters: all letters, all numbers, plus a few extra characters. Base64 represents three bytes with four ASCII characters. Base64 is how email carries attachments, how certificates are stored, how images get embedded in web pages (data URLs), and how bina...

Benchmarks are the rulers of AI, in both senses of the word. As measuring sticks, they work according to an extremely simple logic: If you want to know what an AI model can do, devise a standardized test to gauge it. But AI benchmarks can also dominate the behavior of the entire field. In 1987, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s first benchmark on automatic speech-to-text… Source Benchmarks are the rulers of AI, in both senses of the word. As measuring sticks, they work accor...

Back in early June I blogged about my summer fitness challenge. The two main goals were to lose some weight—from 89.6kg to 85.3kg, the oldest measure I had on record from late 2015—and also to get back into a better shape than I was a decade ago. The weight goal was easily quantifiable; I still have the same exact scale I was using 10 years ago and so it was only a matter of jumping on it every morning and track the progress. As for losing weight, I didn’t really have much of a plan ot...

Writing stories. Sharing things that make me smile. Reading knowledge people have shared openly. Communities that organise knowledge. Project Gutenberg . New music by my favourite artists. Acoustic songs. The spark of “I should learn this on the piano!”. All the people who make events happen. ( related ) Attending events where I learn something new. Seeing people’s curiosity shine through. Learning about art. Having my mind opened by art. Discovering a new persona...

In the OpenAI Math Drop some papers have Lean proofs, others don't, including L = RL = BPL. Why is it hard to formalize results on complexity classes? Let's consider an example, Lautemann's proof that BPP is in \(\Sigma^p_2\). It's a beautiful proof because it comes down to a single formula. I gave the full proof in a 2025 post , but to remind you, here is the setup. Let \(B\) be in BPP, accepted by a probabilistic polynomial-time Turing machine \(M\) with error bounded by \(2^{-n}\). Let...

Previous posts in this series introduced Frml , explained how it checks simplar scalar code and handles contracts between functions , and then discussed how it deals with loops , checks arrays , and checks built-in functions . The final language level, complete , doesn’t add any new features. Instead, it serves as a placeholder in case we want to extend the language further. I’m not going to do this myself, but if you are a student (or a professor looking for projects for students) p...

Python 3.15 is here ! Here's the essential What's new in Python 3.15 guide, this year curated by 3.14 and 3.15 release manager Hugo van Kemenade. As someone who builds open source software that works in every supported Python version, I get to say goodbye to Python 3.10 and start embracing features from Python 3.11. First, some highlights from Python 3.15. Explicit lazy imports I'm most excited about Explicit lazy imports from PEP 810 . These let you import modules like so: lazy ...

La Conquete, by Jose Clemente Orozco, via WikiArt . Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure, and industrial technology. This week we look at Icon’s fundraising, employment in China’s solar industry, grid-scale battery reliability, Tesla’s flying roadster, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber. Housekeeping items this week: I was on MTS Live talking about robots, p...

In no specific order: Removed the search box, because it wasn’t working. Not sure what I’ll replace this with yet. I’ll hopefully be able to leverage whatever CMS’s internal search tool is available when I move back off static-site generation. Fixed the More Buttons sidebar link. Updated the Slash Pages menu link to say /Pages . I like the concept of slash pages , but I despise the name. Sounds violent. Made the header a bit narrower, to take up less space. ...

As an island nation, maritime awareness is essential to Taiwan’s national security. Its coastline stretches more than 1,500 kilometers across the main island and outlying islands, so keeping watch over the surrounding waters requires vessels, sensors, and operators spread over a wide area. Autonomous unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) can extend surveillance, but adding more USVs also means operators spend more time telling each vessel what to do.   Hivemind is Shield AI’s mission autonomy ...

When software meets hardware, engineering principles remain largely the same, but the sensible defaults often change. Kuldeep Singh describes our experience modernizing a large IoT fleet of battery-powered sensors. Our familiar principles remained important; what changed was how we applied them. These practices emerged through experiments, failures, and operational experience—each challenge helping us replace a reasonable assumption with a more sensible default. m...

If AI is so great, why aren’t we seeing an explosion of new, amazing software products? If anyone can turn their idea into working software with coding agents, where is all that software ? People have been asking this question for years. As far as I can tell, the answer is that it’s spread out over a lot of modestly successful projects: Somewhere between 2x and 20x new software is being created, depending on where you look There’s no real growth in massively successful software ...

Formlabs sent me a Form Studio 1 resin 3D printer to test after years of back-and-forth about their Form 4 printer. Like the Form 4, it's an SLA (stereolithography) printer, but unlike the Form 4 (which starts at $2,600), it's affordable for a hobbyist. It's not cheap , coming in at $699 (or $749 with a flex build platform, which I highly recommend), but it is affordable. I can't say as much about this printer as people who are well-versed in resin printing and use other SLA printers (all...

In the hours following the release of CVE-2026-92392 for the project curl , site reliability workers and systems administrators scrambled to desperately rebuild and patch all their systems to fix a use-after-free in HTTP/2 upload retries where cleanup turns leftover upload data into a new request and leaves a pointer to a freed Curl_easy handle (apparently freeing it was only a suggestion), allowing a malicious server to achieve remote code execution under specific conditions . T...

Up until the 1960s, telephone calls were carried as analog signals. There was a great deal of frequency division multiplexing onto open wire , and sometimes coaxial cables , but in the post-war period buried multipair telephone cables began to dominate. While the network was surprisingly functional—long distance calls from coast to coast were still quite intelligible—there were fundamental limitations to analog carriers. The quality of the call would degrade with each step, a problem that ...

We had a Hotpoint engineer come out to repair our washing machine yesterday. While replacing the machine, he forgot to connect the waste pipe and we came down to this mess this morning. 😡 Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️ You can reply to this post by email , or leave a comment . We had a Hotpoint engineer come out to repair our w...

It’s been a few years since Current (and before that, Kafka Summit) was in San Francisco, but here we are—on November 4 & 5 we’ll be there, and I’m excited to continue a tradition that started back in 2019 with a run over the Golden Gate Bridge . It’s been a few years since Current (and before that, Kafka Summit) was in San Francisco, but here we are—on November 4 & 5 we’ll be there, and I’m excited to continue a tradition that started back in 2019 with a run over the Gold...

Prasanna Vijayanathan , Renzo Sanchez-Silva When Jake Paul and Mike Tyson stepped into the ring in November 2024, we delivered the fight to roughly 65 million concurrent streams. On an ordinary day our infrastructure takes in more than 2 billion requests and handles upwards of 38 million real-time logging events every second. At that scale, the whole picture doesn’t fit into a single engineering team’s head or onto a single dashboard. With more Live content, Podcasts and real-time streams, ...

Kevin Kelly 's The Inevitable articulates a handful of macro technological trends and follows them to their logical conclusions. It's an insightful read -- I highly recommend it. One decade later, here are some AI-related excerpts from the book: "By 2026, Google’s main product will not be search but AI." "oligarchy of two or three large, general-purpose cloud-based commercial intelligences" "The AI on the horizon looks more like Amazon Web Services" "The bulk of AI will be specia...

This post has a content note of pet loss. Visit the link directly if you're okay with reading it. This post has a content note of pet loss. Visit the link directly if you're okay with reading it.

I am a habitual tab hoarder so I created a Firefox addon to help me manage every one of my very special browser tabs. Sort tabs by oldest, unload them, find duplicates, and consolidate tabs to a single window — buncha useful stuff in there! Download from Mozilla Addons Source code on GitHub Features Go directly to a tab by clicking on it. Shows Duplicate tabs (any tab opened more than once) A special section to show any tabs currently playing audio (video counts if no...

I spent a week creating a new deflate implementation from scratch in C named tugz to provide an Info-ZIP -compatible zip program for w64devkit 2.10.1 (released today). I also replaced busybox-w32 ’s deflate-based unzip , gzip , gunzip , and zcat apps as well. My new deflate performs better than zlib but worse than libdeflate ( so far ). In general the new programs are substantially faster and produce slightly smaller outputs than the BusyBox equivalents, which is optimized f...